I was in a car crash once. I was approaching a junction calmly at three hundred miles an hour and I just clipped this bus. Only slightly. It flipped my car and I tumbled along the highway for the next eight thousand yards, spinning nineteen times. I hit eight other cars too – all of which exploded in a fireball and flew into five story buildings. It caused about nine million dollars of damage and boy, there was so much paperwork for that!
This was four years ago, in Burnout 3. I remember that game for one thing and one thing only: crash mode. A masterpiece of game design – a perfected game mechanic of beautiful arcade thrills and tactile, satisfying rewards. Endlessly replayable, thrilling to play, it reached into my heart and stirred some primal urge to blow stuff up. It was effortless in conception; ‘Here’s an idea. Lets let the player crash his car into other cars over and over and over!,’ and ultimately the longest lasting and most rewarding part of that fine game.
Amazingly, this mode is completely absent from Burnout Paradise. In my opinion, this is an unforgivable design choice. The poor imitation that is the ‘showtime’ mode is just not cutting it. Instead of playing like a Hollywood action scene, it’s more like Kartamari Damacy, making you laughably roll your car down a street and into objects to collect a bonus in the most ridiculous manner ever conceived. How I long for a proper crash mode in this game.
The rest of the game, though, is of high quality. Paradise City itself is as polished and expansive as you would want, and completely open - there is no menu selection, no chain of events, no schedule or world tour or anything. You just drive. Pull up at a junction and rev your engine, and you’ll start events that are all unlocked from the moment you buy the game. You can probably guess what these include: Racing other cars, causing specific crashes, taking down other cars, etc. The open world implementation both works and fails at the same time.
While being able to access all of the content from day one is pleasing, when Criterion say you can drive anywhere they weren’t kidding. You spend so much of this driving game just driving. What Burnout Paradise needed was the bookmark system from skate – a game which borrows parts of this mechanic from many others. In that game, you could at any point (which also featured an open city similar to Paradise) lay down a bookmark and instantly warp to it at any time with a single button press. In Burnout Paradise, if you find a particularly good ‘line,’ a set of ramps or a gap between buildings that is interesting and fun to drive, you have to turn around once you get to the end and trudge back to run the gauntlet once more.
In fact, Burnout Paradise is so similar to skate, I am puzzled why this obvious design choice wasn’t flat out copied. The game rewards exploration and interesting lines. Similar to skate, the discovery of a new perfect run is intensely exciting. Working out the best way to gap over a parking lot and through a glass window would be much more enjoyable if I didn’t have to spend two minutes after each attempt driving back to the start.
Events, though, are cleverly positioned though so that at the end of a particular one there is likely to be another which leads you back where you came from. This means in Burnout Paradise you can constantly keep attempting challenges, and the variety and density of them is incredible. It is a relentless assault on your senses. Apparently, Paradise City is where all the empty wooden crates found in every other game are manufactured, as they litter every street in ridiculous quantities.
Also, again like skate, the city has its own ‘game logic.’ In real life, there isn’t a ramp around every corner, or a pile of boxes to smash through, or huge drop-offs and wide billboards on the end of every freeway, which by the way are all unfinished. But in Burnout Paradise the world is consistent. It feels like a Looney Toon in that way, completely unbelievable yet coherent at the same time. You will have fun playing Burnout Paradise, no doubt. It also offers tremendous value, with a robust jump-in-jump-out online mode, free roaming multiplayer and more challenges and events then you will ever hope to see.
Don’t attempt to ‘complete’ this game like other Burnouts. Play it much more like a sandbox. A sandbox which you can flip a Humvee into. Play it for 10 minutes before going to work. Play it with a beer in one hand and a half eaten pizza in the other (bonus points for multitasking). Play it the morning after nights you would rather forget. That is the spirit of Burnout which has remained since day one. It is enjoyable, disposable fun.
Playing Burnout Paradise is like being 100 feet tall and skating on the roof of a car. An interstate is a half pipe, a parking garage a vert ramp, a fishing pier a rail to grind. Unfortunately, without the robust crash mode from previous iterations, this game will get old quicker than previous installments. Driving around the city is fun, but at the same time completely lacking in difficulty or challenge. If you wreck a car, you get a new one instantly. While this keeps the game flowing, it also means that you don’t achieve such a sense of progression previous games offered.
Burnout Paradise is supremely well made, and a shining example of the ‘fun for five minutes’ idea of game design. This is the game you break out in three years after the Superbowl while everyone is still on the couch. This is the game you play to relieve stress. This is the game you play to crash cars. It is that simple.
A pain, then, that Paradise features fewer ways to achieve this goal than other Burnout games. And for that, it sits in an awkward middle ground between serious racer and stylized crash fun.
